ABSTRACT
In 1834, near what is now Green Bay, Wisconsin, three white servants were auctioned off at public sale by order of the justice of the peace. The three men, all from Canada, had been convicted of being ‘stubborn servants, for running away and breaching their contracts’ with fur trader Daniel Whitney. The men were to be ‘publicly sold’ for a term of two months to ‘any white inhabitant’ of the Michigan Territory who bid the highest. 1 Such an auction seems antithetical to the notion of free soil, free labour and free men that was supposed to pervade the frontier. 2
